Knowledge Zone - Operations



Business Process Reengineering: Key Success Factors

- by Prashant Vaidyanathan *

Part - I

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) efforts fail to achieve their goals at a rate of 70%. The salient observation about this statistic is that an enterprise or organization would have to be facing critical business issues or have considerable problems to attempt a high-risk, highly visible BPR project, given these significant chances of failing. However, a closer examination of this failure statistic must be warranted to provide meaning into how to reduce this statistic.

There are three primary reasons attributed to failing BPR efforts.

  • The first reason is the lack of an adequate business case resulting in unclear, unreasonable, or unjustifiable expectations for what is wanted or expected to result from a BPR effort.

  • A second reason can be the absence of robust and reliable technology and methodologies for performing BPR so that there is a failing in executing BPR efforts.

  • A third reason is an incomplete or inadequate implementation. Re-orienting a traditional organization from a function to a process focus requires a major cultural change in the organization. It also requires major change to the information systems that support the organization. The organization does not know what to expect and is often surprised, angered, or threatened by the change proposed. If the project does not correctly manage the expectations of the organization it will not be allowed to finish what was started.

The objective of this paper would be to examine factors that would lead to successful outcomes, by focusing on achieving results from the first stages of a BPR project to implementation. These include: -

Top Management Sponsorship

Major business process change typically affects processes, technology, job roles and culture in the workplace. Significant changes to even one of these areas require resources, money, and leadership. Changing them simultaneously is an extraordinary task. If top management does not provide strong and consistent support, most likely one of these three elements (money, resources, or leadership) will not be present over the life of the project, severely crippling your chances for success.

Next

* Contributed by -
Prashant Vaidyanathan,
II Year, PGDBM,
IMT, Ghaziabad.